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Did anyone else catch the irony in Friedman talking about employers that "increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online univ

by aliston 13y ago

Did anyone else catch the irony in Friedman talking about employers that "increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale," then writing an article entirely about two Yale graduates who went to work at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs post-graduation? Last time I checked, McKinsey isn't recruiting at University of Phoenix. Going to Yale doesn't hurt in getting into YCombinator either. Nowadays, YC's name recongnition functions as a credential as well. Dig a little deeper than the title, and this op-ed only reinforces the reality that credentials and connections matter a lot more than raw skill.

chatmasta 13y ago
Have people considered that "credentials and connections" are actually a valuable signaling mechanism? Connections (in the broadest sense of the word) indicate that a candidate is able to form strong personal relationships. People are not robots, and this ability goes a long way in the workforce. If you are hiring someone, you know you're going to spend the majority of your waking time with that person for the foreseeable future. So any kind of signal that this will prove a positive use of your time is a valuable one. This is not to say that other schools don't offer this mechanism. I'm simply observing that the idea of "connections" does not carry nearly as much negative weight as its connotations often imply. Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate. Consider that nobody is born into Yale (contrary to popular belief, and any exceptions to this are in the minority). To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company's point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way -- if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it's a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a "lemon" candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school. You know that at the very least the candidate is capable of learning quickly on the job. In many industries, especially those where most domain knowledge comes from real world experience, like finance and consulting, the ability to learn quickly is a candidates most valuable asset. If every candidate will arrive at the company with a "blank slate"of knowledge and experience, why not recruit the ones who can fill up their slate the best? This is why finance companies recruit history majors, for instance. They know that success in a liberal arts education demonstrates an ability to learn quickly (not to mention strong writing skills). I know many people on here are anti-liberal arts or anti-Ivy favoritism. Those arguments, especially the latter, have obvious validity. But I hope this post will cause you to consider the other side of the argument. Disclaimer: I go to Yale. I realize we are extremely spoiled in the job market, but I also do not necessarily think it's undeserved. It's unfortunate that other people suffer, but I do not feel like we are disproportionately favored. I think a VERY high majority of Yale students are top 1% job candidates. Everybody gets in here for a reason.
- esharef 13y ago
  The point is that right now people don't look at anything other than the fact that you went to Yale. If you didn't go to a good school, it's very hard to get noticed in today's job market. There's something fundamentally wrong with that given that with a few exceptions, where you went to school is directly correlated with your family's household income.
  - chatmasta 13y ago
    That may have been true ten years ago, but is completely untrue today. Every Ivy League school, at least, is completely need blind. Financial aid packages are extremely generous and you pay only what you can afford. If your family's income is less than $70k (or more if you have siblings), you pay nothing. I'm sure there is a correlation, but I disagree that it is a causation. Much of the correlation is probably the result of early-life educational advantages for stronger socioeconomic families. That's an unfortunate correlation indicative of a larger social problem, but not indicative of admission to Yale depending on income, as you seem to be implying. The two just unfortunately correlate.
    - jasonshen 13y ago
      > where you went to school is directly correlated with your family's household income. Not sure where you got causation from that statement. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if Yale "means" to discriminate against poor people, but the fact is that if you are poor, you are far less likely to experience a childhood and academic life that will do well against the Yale admission requirements.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - chatmasta 13y ago
    That was a very sad incident, but I fail to see the relevance at all.
- 13y ago
esharef 13y ago
Elli from HireArt here. I think your comment is really interesting and important to take note of. It's a bit funny in my particular case because I actually worked for University of Phoenix for a few years which is how I got the idea for HireArt. I met a ton of students at UOP who hadn't been as lucky as I had in going to a school like Yale (FYI, I was an athletic recruit so felt really grateful to be there). Employers literally ignored their resumes and would never get back to them. I was shocked because I would talk to some of these students and thought they were talented, ambitious, hard-working, etc. The thing that makes me passionate about HireArt is trying to overcome the obsession with credentials (which are very highly correlated with socio-economics) and moving toward a more meritocratic way of hiring. Can I say that I am totally rid of the drive towards prestige? No. I fall into that trap. It's a hard trap not to fall into given how much society values brand names. Anyway, you pointed out a tension that I actually struggle with a lot. A recent article about the "college bubble" recently called for all Ivy-League graduates to 'renounce' their degrees to stop the bubble from continuing. It's hard in practice but the point of the article is that unless the people with Ivy-League degrees stop caring so much about them, the status quo cannot change.
- wavefunction 13y ago
  Thank you for your perspective, it's easy to get defensive but it seems like you maybe made it through whatever "prestige traps" you may have encountered along the way. college dropout here, I didn't have money and now that I've been working, it's hard to have the time...
- dlf 13y ago
  Thank you for the insightful response to a comment that frankly felt a bit baiting. I admire how you're approaching the problem at HireArt, and am thankful that the current wave of disruption in education should hopefully keep society from feeling the full fallout of the education bubble. It will be interesting to see what the world looks like in 10 years. However, I think the bubble will persist even if all degrees were viewed as equal due to the economics around cheap financing of degrees and disincentives among universities to compete on price and incentives to compete on ancillary concerns like luxury housing, amenities, facilities, and the like. Of course, even without this warped structure of incentives, the university model is one with huge overhead, a rigid and inflexible structure, slow to adapt to change (though they are trying), and not nearly as well positioned to take advantage of economies of scale as the likes of Udacity, Coursera, or even UOP. This entire topic fascinates me, and I don't think we've even begun to unravel all of the causes and implications of what these changes mean for society and the future of education. Exciting times!
LemonadeBoy 13y ago
Connections and credentials matter in getting a job. If I had to pick between the two, I would say connections would tip credentials in opening the door and credentials could keep it open. Getting a job in a startup especially in a smaller market, raw skills get noticed. When someone I know and trust, refers me to a rock star developer, I don’t even look at his CV and don’t really care who he knows. I simply throw the sink at him. His work shows his worth fairly fast. This is true even when the developer has no educational credentials.
blazespin 13y ago
Bit of a difference between 'getting a job' and getting funded at YC or publishing in the NYT :)

by aliston 13y ago

chatmasta 13y ago

Have people considered that "credentials and connections" are actually a valuable signaling mechanism? Connections (in the broadest sense of the word) indicate that a candidate is able to form strong personal relationships. People are not robots, and this ability goes a long way in the workforce. If you are hiring someone, you know you're going to spend the majority of your waking time with that person for the foreseeable future. So any kind of signal that this will prove a positive use of your time is a valuable one. This is not to say that other schools don't offer this mechanism. I'm simply observing that the idea of "connections" does not carry nearly as much negative weight as its connotations often imply. Similarly, credentials indicate that a candidate has conaistently passed more screening processes over a long duration of time than a company could practically present to the candidate. Consider that nobody is born into Yale (contrary to popular belief, and any exceptions to this are in the minority). To get to Yale, you effectively must pass through a fifteen year funnel. No company can match that kind of screening rigor, so why not leverage it? From a company's point of view, it would be dumb not to. (Also, think about it this way -- if you are a high school senior with a choice of any school, and therefore one of the smartest in your class, will you choose Yale or a state school? I parenthesized this because it's a straw man argument, but do consider that financial barriers to the Ivy League are basically non-existent nowadays.) Yes, you can get qualified candidates from other schools. But your chances of getting a "lemon" candidate from Yale are, I presume, much lower than getting one from another school. You know that at the very least the candidate is capable of learning quickly on the job. In many industries, especially those where most domain knowledge comes from real world experience, like finance and consulting, the ability to learn quickly is a candidates most valuable asset. If every candidate will arrive at the company with a "blank slate"of knowledge and experience, why not recruit the ones who can fill up their slate the best? This is why finance companies recruit history majors, for instance. They know that success in a liberal arts education demonstrates an ability to learn quickly (not to mention strong writing skills). I know many people on here are anti-liberal arts or anti-Ivy favoritism. Those arguments, especially the latter, have obvious validity. But I hope this post will cause you to consider the other side of the argument. Disclaimer: I go to Yale. I realize we are extremely spoiled in the job market, but I also do not necessarily think it's undeserved. It's unfortunate that other people suffer, but I do not feel like we are disproportionately favored. I think a VERY high majority of Yale students are top 1% job candidates. Everybody gets in here for a reason.

esharef 13y ago
The point is that right now people don't look at anything other than the fact that you went to Yale. If you didn't go to a good school, it's very hard to get noticed in today's job market. There's something fundamentally wrong with that given that with a few exceptions, where you went to school is directly correlated with your family's household income.
- chatmasta 13y ago
  That may have been true ten years ago, but is completely untrue today. Every Ivy League school, at least, is completely need blind. Financial aid packages are extremely generous and you pay only what you can afford. If your family's income is less than $70k (or more if you have siblings), you pay nothing. I'm sure there is a correlation, but I disagree that it is a causation. Much of the correlation is probably the result of early-life educational advantages for stronger socioeconomic families. That's an unfortunate correlation indicative of a larger social problem, but not indicative of admission to Yale depending on income, as you seem to be implying. The two just unfortunately correlate.
  - jasonshen 13y ago
    > where you went to school is directly correlated with your family's household income. Not sure where you got causation from that statement. Ultimately, it doesn't matter if Yale "means" to discriminate against poor people, but the fact is that if you are poor, you are far less likely to experience a childhood and academic life that will do well against the Yale admission requirements.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- chatmasta 13y ago
  That was a very sad incident, but I fail to see the relevance at all.
13y ago

esharef 13y ago

Elli from HireArt here. I think your comment is really interesting and important to take note of. It's a bit funny in my particular case because I actually worked for University of Phoenix for a few years which is how I got the idea for HireArt. I met a ton of students at UOP who hadn't been as lucky as I had in going to a school like Yale (FYI, I was an athletic recruit so felt really grateful to be there). Employers literally ignored their resumes and would never get back to them. I was shocked because I would talk to some of these students and thought they were talented, ambitious, hard-working, etc. The thing that makes me passionate about HireArt is trying to overcome the obsession with credentials (which are very highly correlated with socio-economics) and moving toward a more meritocratic way of hiring. Can I say that I am totally rid of the drive towards prestige? No. I fall into that trap. It's a hard trap not to fall into given how much society values brand names. Anyway, you pointed out a tension that I actually struggle with a lot. A recent article about the "college bubble" recently called for all Ivy-League graduates to 'renounce' their degrees to stop the bubble from continuing. It's hard in practice but the point of the article is that unless the people with Ivy-League degrees stop caring so much about them, the status quo cannot change.

wavefunction 13y ago
Thank you for your perspective, it's easy to get defensive but it seems like you maybe made it through whatever "prestige traps" you may have encountered along the way. college dropout here, I didn't have money and now that I've been working, it's hard to have the time...
dlf 13y ago
Thank you for the insightful response to a comment that frankly felt a bit baiting. I admire how you're approaching the problem at HireArt, and am thankful that the current wave of disruption in education should hopefully keep society from feeling the full fallout of the education bubble. It will be interesting to see what the world looks like in 10 years. However, I think the bubble will persist even if all degrees were viewed as equal due to the economics around cheap financing of degrees and disincentives among universities to compete on price and incentives to compete on ancillary concerns like luxury housing, amenities, facilities, and the like. Of course, even without this warped structure of incentives, the university model is one with huge overhead, a rigid and inflexible structure, slow to adapt to change (though they are trying), and not nearly as well positioned to take advantage of economies of scale as the likes of Udacity, Coursera, or even UOP. This entire topic fascinates me, and I don't think we've even begun to unravel all of the causes and implications of what these changes mean for society and the future of education. Exciting times!

LemonadeBoy 13y ago

Connections and credentials matter in getting a job. If I had to pick between the two, I would say connections would tip credentials in opening the door and credentials could keep it open. Getting a job in a startup especially in a smaller market, raw skills get noticed. When someone I know and trust, refers me to a rock star developer, I don’t even look at his CV and don’t really care who he knows. I simply throw the sink at him. His work shows his worth fairly fast. This is true even when the developer has no educational credentials.

blazespin 13y ago

Bit of a difference between 'getting a job' and getting funded at YC or publishing in the NYT :)